Tim Cook: Apple Music on Android is just the beginning

If you’re an Android user with a certain acquired taste for some of Apple‘s services and were surprised, even elated, at the recent Apple Music app update, here’s some more good news. Apple might be bringing a whole lot more of its services to its rival platform. This was revealed by no less than chief executive Tim Cook himself at a company-wide town hall meeting. So unless Cook is thwarted by a company upheaval, you can probably expect popular services like iCloud and Apple Pay to come to Android in the, hopefully near, future.

It seems that the age of platforms keeping to themselves and shutting out rivals is on the verge of ending. Now platform makers are actually playing to the strengths of their rivals as well. Apple has surprisingly made available not one but two Android apps, though one of them has been critically panned by Android users. Just recently, Apple updated its Apple Music app to add a feature that is technically impossible on the iPhone: saving music to a micro SD card for offline listening.

That move hinted that Apple was serious about its Android app, and apparently that was indeed more than the case. Under Cook, Apple has been trying to portray an image of a services company more than just a hardware and OS maker. Those services include iCloud apps and storage, Apple Pay, and iMessage, just to name a few.

This almost echoes Microsoft’s own strategy lately. It is spreading its apps both on Android and iOS, sometimes to the detriment of its own Windows Phone platform, in an attempt to get more users on its services instead of focusing on trying to make them use its mobile hardware. This has seemingly worked for Redmond and might be the blueprint that Apple intends to follow.

As to what those next services are or when they’re arriving, Cook isn’t saying. Although Apple Pay might be ideal, it is too integrated with iOS, especially the security features, making it harder to port over. iCloud storage might be easier, but iMessage will probably even more strategic at this point.